Patients may be monitored by a host of medical devices from simple scales providing patient weight information to sophisticated electrocardiographs (“EKG”) detecting life threatening arrhythmias. These devices generally digitize some aspect of the patient's physiology, converting it into data that can be transmitted to a destination through a wireless communication network. The air interface protocols used in these wireless communication networks are generally short range air interfaces (e.g., Wi-Fi®, Bluetooth®, Bluetooth Low Energy® connections) or cellular/wide area air interfaces (e.g., Third Generation (3G), Fourth Generation (4G), Long Term Evolution (LTE), Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS), and other mobile telephony communication technologies).
The transmission of medical data over air interfaces may be governed by a number of communications standards promulgated by health regulatory authorities, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), European Commission Directorate General for Health and Consumers, etc. While specialized medical devices, such as patient monitors, surgical monitors, or specialized hospital devices may be designed to comply with regulatory standards, other more general computing devices may not be configured to comply with the regulatory standards. Such general computing devices may include desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Thus, general computing devices which would otherwise be capable of receiving and transmitting medical data may not be able to participate in regulated medical data networks. In order to participate in such networks, general computing devices may have to be specifically configured to comply with regulatory standards, which reduces the flexibility and increases the cost of setting up medical data networks.